


Cold Wind

by jeremey



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 17:30:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20139280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeremey/pseuds/jeremey
Summary: Set in the future, a girl learns of a peculiar gene she's inherited.





	Cold Wind

**Author's Note:**

> This is a short story I wrote for my creative writing class in 2017. I'm putting it here for preservation, and as such I won't be editing it from the state I found it in.  
Since it's a bit old by now, I'm not looking for criticism. Thanks.
> 
> General trigger warning for depressing topics.

A quaint Starbucks sits at the end of Joshua Avenue. Within, an old man and a young woman sit across from each other, the former flicking around her phone screen and the latter sipping at his coffee.

The old man decides it’s time to break the silence. “Happy birthday, Val.” He smiles.

The young woman looks up. For a split second, her face reveals a bit of uncertainty, though she eventually smiles back.

The old man goes solemn. “I have something important to tell you.”

The young woman can only respond with silence. Is she in trouble? Did someone die?

The old man lets out a hearty yet pensive chuckle. “Oh, don’t worry, Val. It’s nothing bad, really.”

His statement renders the young woman confused, so she sidetracks herself to the clinking of dishes and the buzzing of blenders, dishwashers, and whatever else they keep behind that counter. She’s so sidetracked, in fact, that one could only barely notice she’s shivering.

“Valerie, remember when we had your DNA tested?” The sudden snap back to the conversation was startling, sure, but the young woman managed to recollect herself in the form of shaking her head from side to side.

“Fair enough. I guess you were either in elementary school… Or middle school?… Hah, I guess I don’t remember either. But  _ when _ you had it done doesn’t really matter, yeah? Yeah…” The young woman nods in a distinct  _ yeah _ formation. Meanwhile, a barista’s voice echoes through the café as an anticipant lady gets up to grab her ambiguous cold beverage.

“Do you know how old I am, Val?”

The young woman takes a shamefully long time to mutter an uncertain  _ sixty-three. _

The old man breathes in. “I’m two-hundred and sixty-three.”

Is he joking? It’s not exactly a funny joke, but the young woman laughs anyway.

The old man sighs and pulls a few neatly-folded papers out of his shirt pocket. One seems to be some sort of document, and the two others appear to be newspaper clippings.

The young woman slides the newspaper clippings towards her first. The smaller of the clippings housed a two-paragraph article accompanied by a young man holding a German shepherd.

_ … August 17, 1926. Local Man Rescues Dog From Flood. 17-year-old Antony Jeremoth performs amazing feat…  _

Peculiar. The young woman looks over the second clipping. It’s several paragraphs long, though still only has one photo, which is of a thirty-something-looking man displaying a line graph.

_ …April 3rd, 1984… Global Warming Debate…  _

The article is wordy and confusing, so the young woman’s eyes wander to the picture’s caption.

_ Antony Jeremoth displays documentation of temperature change over the past 100 years. _

The young woman looks back at the pictures, and sure enough, Antony Jeremoth from 1926 and Antony Jeremoth from 1984 have nearly identical features: a crooked nose, deep-set eyes… And if you look closely, there’s a small, blobby birthmark on Antony’s left cheek.

Now to the document. It’s a copy of Antony’s birth certificate. He was born in 1909.

Puzzle pieces slowly snap together in the young woman’s head. “Is this one of my great grandfathers?”

“Specifically your great-great-great-great grandfather…”

Something still bothers the young woman. She gets that the old man in front of her must be named after the man in the newspaper clippings — the old man’s name is Antony Jeremoth, too — but something more specific stands out to her. How is Antony seventeen in 1926 when he doesn’t look anywhere near sixty in 1964?

“Valerie, you and I share a certain special gene…”

The young woman looks up from the papers to notice a familiar — albeit very faded — birthmark on the old man’s left cheek. 

“The doctors like to call it the longevity gene.”

Stumped, the young woman waits for the old man to continue.

“The science behind it is that the older and older you are, the faster and faster your cells repair themselves —if you have the longevity gene.” The old man lets the young woman take in the new information. “People are pretty much fully-developed when they’re twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five… And that’s when the effects of the gene are irreversible.”

The whole caf é seems to go silent as the young woman contemplates on everything she was told.

“Valerie—let me be frank with you. You’re immortal.”

The young woman seems taken aback.

“I mean, you  _ will be  _ when you turn twenty-something.”

The young woman buries her face in her hands, which are oddly cold. A faint  _ do I have a choice in this _ whines through her palms.

“Yes. Since you turned eighteen today—you can sign to have your gene removed. Just can’t wait until you’re too old, though… Like I said—well, maybe I didn’t say this exactly—when you’re fully developed your genes are pretty much set in stone.” Wetness leaks through the young woman’s fingers. “I mean—I think you can still change your hair color and stuff—your natural hair color—and… Are you okay? Hey, maybe we should head to the car, alright?”

The sky outside the Starbucks of Joshua Avenue is a bleak gray, even though it was clear just this morning. The young woman catches her irritated complexion reflected in her family’s black Toyota before climbing in.

The rain patters the windshield as the vehicle rumbles down the street. 

“I’m sorry, Val. I didn’t expect you to be so… I dunno. But trust me when I say this situation isn’t so bad.”

“Dad… Should I call you Grandpa—?”

“No.”

“Okay… Dad, well. You can’t just come up to me and expect me to be able to choose how long I wanna live. It’s like—everyone around me always asks why anyone would want to die, and I’m always like—I don’t know,  _ I don’t know. _ ”

“I’m sorry.”

“I think—I think that everything good has to come to an end—”

“I agree.”

“—but, is choosing that I’m gonna die someday the same as choosing to kill myself?”

“Val, are you worried about the hospital again? Val, no matter what you choose no one will send you back there—”

“Please don’t bring that up…”

“I’m sorry. No, it’s not the same as choosing to kill yourself.”

The car goes silent for the next couple of minutes.

“Listen. When I was growing up, no one knew of the of the longevity gene, so no one knew I had it. I never had a chance to get rid of it… I’ve seen so many generations of people, of family, of  _ friends  _ live and die. Before you came along, I’ve—I’ve tried to escape it. But I can’t. It’s like I’m being forced to live, and you know that being forced to do anything isn’t such a good feeling.”

“Dad. I shouldn’t want to die. And I definitely don’t want you to die.”

“No one wants to see anyone die.” The old man sighs and continues down the foggy road. 

A jolt of energy, of noise, of pain suddenly makes its way through the vehicle. No one knows what’s happening. Shattering glass. Crumpling metal. Car horns. The old man crawls out of the chaos, bleeding but healing fast.

“Valerie!” he yells. His only response is the subtle pulsing of bloodied limbs hidden in the wreck, which turn still a few seconds after. The old man gets on his knees and cries.


End file.
